I had a lengthy discussion with my sister the other day about art (she’s a painter and an avid webcomic nerd, but she dislikes graphic design and digital art, because she thinks it’s a cop-out), and specifically how the internet is affecting art, mostly in terms of comics, but also in terms of art that people create offline and integrate into online space (i.e. Lunch Bag Art.)

How we really won WWII.

I love comics, but I’ve never loved them outside of the internet. Spiderman and Captain America are pretty cool, but I just never really got into it. And frankly, Superman is an asshole. Then came NN2S, which I’ve been following since 2003. After that, I discovered a slew of independently produced comics that represent those who can’t quite relate to what Marvel and DC produces, stuff that you never saw on the shelves of comic book shops. It opened up a mode of creativity for under-represented groups (i.e. DAR, run by a lesbian, and thingpart, run by a transgender woman), and those who sucked at art but wanted to make something creative that people would read (i.e. dinosaur comics, which uses the same images for every single comic). Independent/online comic producers even have their own convention to rival the gigantic superhero comic cons, the small press expo.

Lunch Bag Art

The internet has also changed the way we view “traditional art,” which is best exemplified by Lunch Bag Art. A man began drawing on his kid’s lunch bags and posting them on tumblr. The lunch bags caught on and eventually generated merchandise. This guy’s art isn’t something you would probably see in a gallery, but it’s good enough to deserve a better medium than a paper bag. If it wasn’t for the internet, he probably wouldn’t have bothered spending so much time on his kid’s lunch bags, because not many people would see it. What does this say about how we define art? I want to look at how the internet has changed the idea of traditional art, without looking at computer-generated art.

This is going to be very, very hard. I’d like to try making my own comic (I suck at drawing), possibly using something like Pixton, however, I might just use MS Paint because Pixton’s characters are limited and kind of ugly. However, MS Paint might take forever.

Any thoughts/suggestions? Yay or nay? I’m also throwing around the idea of including mobile comics, which completely removes the need for the Sunday “funnies.” HOW SAD IS THAT!?!?Similar Posts:

What do we mean by ‘freedom’? Should Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) necessarily be powered by radical politics of ownership and collaboration? Or is the latching of “Free Software” ideological baggage limiting the full transformative power of “Open Source”. How are these questions informed by licenses? Are some licenses more open than others? More ethical than others? This emotional debate has been in the heart of FLOSS from its early days and has created camps and animosities within the community.

Upgrade! NY continues its program series on open source as it relates to activism and creative practice. Join us for a discussion and debate on what constitutes freedom within the Open Source and Free Culture movements. We will examine the strong ideological differences through a provocative panel discussion with Gabriella Coleman and Zachary Lieberman.

Gabriella Coleman is an anthropologist who examines ethics and online collaboration as well as the role of the law and new media technologies in extending and critiquing liberal values and sustaining new forms of political activism. Between 2001-2003 she conducted ethnographic research on computer hackers primarily in San Francisco, the Netherlands, as well as those hackers who work on the largest free software project, Debian. She is completing a book manuscript “Coding Freedom: Hacker Pleasure and the Ethics of Free and Open Source Software” (under contract with Princeton University Press) and is starting a new project on peer to peer patient activism on the Internet. She is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including ones from the National Science Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council.

Zach Lieberman

Zachary Lieberman’s work uses technology in a playful way to explore the nature of communication and the delicate boundary between the visible and the invisible. He creates performances, installations and on-line works that investigate gestural input, augmentation of the body and kinetic response. Recently, he helped create visuals for the facade of the new Ars Electronica Museum, wrote software for an augmented reality card trick, and helped develop an open source eye tracker to help a paralyzed graffiti artist draw again. In addition to making artistic work, Lieberman is a co-creator of openframeworks, a toolkit for creative coding and teaches at Parsons School of Design.

Upgrade! NY is co-produced by Eyebeam and Not An Alternative.Similar Posts: